1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cutting device and method for plastic lens.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, lens is usually made of glass or plastic. Since glass lens needs to be ground during manufacturing with a relatively high cost and the cost for making plastic lens is often lower than that for glass lens, plastic lens is popular in consumer electronics commonly seen on the present market, e.g., digital cameras, and eyeglasses. A flow chart of a conventional method for making a plastic lens is shown in FIG. 1. As is shown in FIG. 1, the first step of making plastic lens is to injection mold plastic material in a mold. FIG. 2 is a schematic view of a sub-finished assembly 1 of plastic lens which includes four integrally formed plastic lenses 10. The lenses 10 are connected with each other by input carriers 12 and transmission carriers 13. The sub-finished assembly 1 is cut in a cutting area to separate the lenses 10 from the input and the transmission carriers 12, 13.
After cutting, the lens 10 needs to be plated to improve its optical characteristics. Finally, the lens 10 is packed to be sold.
Plastic lens is conventionally cut manually, which results in many problems. First, manual operation consumes a large amount of time and significantly increases the cost of the product. Second, the lens is apt to be contaminated during manual cutting by dust in the air, dirt on worker's hand, and/or saliva of worker. The contamination affects plating quality or increases cleaning cost before plating. Finally, the cutting precision is dependent on personal factors of workers, such as degree of diligence and level of skill. In addition, with the rapid development of technology, lens needs to be made more and more smaller and manual cutting is more and more difficult and more and more slower.
Thus, an improvement is required to overcome the disadvantages of the prior art.